Ultimate Living Fossils

Ultimate living fossils found, according to a report in BBC News, 21 November 2008. Marine biologists exploring the sea bed of the Bahamas have found some giant single celled organisms that leave tracks in the sea bed similar to fossil tracks found in pre-Cambrian rocks. The bubble-like organisms are called protists and move very slowly, at less than one cm a week, using pseudopodia, leaving tracks that remain formed for a long time because the ocean currents at this depth are very slow. The tracks look similar to fossils called worm casts found in the Stirling ranges in Australia that are dated as 1.2 billion years old. The worm cast fossils were found with fossils described as "globular or bulbous collapsible bodies", which the researchers suggest were the remains of the protists. Mikhail Matz of University of Texas, Austin, who led the research, said that the giant protist is probably one of the planet's oldest body designs, and may have existed for 1.8 billion years. "Our guys may be the ultimate living fossils of the macroscopic world," he says.

Editorial Comment: Not only is this an interesting comment on the fact that even single celled creatures were once much bigger than at present, it’s a reminder that Charles Darwin used the term “living fossil” for organisms whose fossils are the same as their living counterparts. However, Darwin failed to mention that such creatures are no help to his theory, so let us make the point yet again – if a protist has remained a protist – through all recorded geological history, then just putting a very old date on the fossil (1.8 billion yrs) does not help evolution either, because the older you make the fossil protist, the more times the organism has reproduced itself without changing, i.e. not evolving. The evidence is very consistent with the claim that, from Protists to Pterodactyls to People, creatures really do produce after their kind as Genesis states, or sadly they die out which is the opposite of evolution. (Ref. Giants, palaeontology, invertebrates)